Top 10 Ways To Improve The Battery Life On Your Phone And Laptop

Batteries don't last forever. All too soon, you'll notice your laptop and/or smartphone don't last as long as they used to. To maximise that (sometimes non-user-replaceable) battery's lifespan and also get more juice out of it during the day, follow these top ten tips.

Illustration by Tina Mailhot-Roberge.

#10 Use your laptop manufacturer's battery care tools

Laptop makers such as Lenovo and Sony sometimes offer battery maintenance tools that automatically prevent the battery from being stored at full charge, which can make the battery deteriorate faster. Look for a battery or power management utility on your laptop to see if you could benefit and if the laptop is plugged in for long periods of time and can work without the battery in it, remove the battery.

#6 Choose sleep mode instead of shutdown

When you put your laptop to sleep it still draws some power, which might lead you to think it's better to shutdown your computer. However, in our experience, shutting down and starting up a laptop can actually draw more power than putting it to sleep and waking it. Hibernating saves more battery life than sleep mode, but it takes longer to get back to up and running. How-To Geek has a primer on sleep, shutdown, and hibernate modes to help you decide when to use each.

#5 Calibrate your phone or laptop battery

Your phone and laptop can sometimes lie about how much charge you have left. Calibrating the battery every so often will make sure it's accurate. The process is pretty easy, at least on laptops. (Unfortunately, if calibration doesn't help and your battery life is piddling, it's time to replace the battery, if possible.)

#4 Don't let your phone or laptop run out of battery too often

Modern batteries these days don't need to be frequently fully discharged in order to retain battery life. Instead, charge more often before use rather than letting the battery run down. These shallow charges will help extend your battery's lifespan.

#3 Don't leave your phone plugged in when it's completely charged

In a similar vein, you don't need to charge your battery all the way to 100%. 40-80% would be preferable. If you do charge your gadget to 100%, unplug it so it doesn't stay at that fully-charged, battery-health-eating state. (When in doubt, you might also want to unplug your laptop regularly.) As for rapid charging, while it could reduce battery life, the difference probably won't be noticeable for most people.

#2 Test and monitor your laptop's battery

Batteries can be mystifying with all these do's and don'ts to follow. If you find your laptop battery doesn't hold a charge very long anymore, there are some troubleshooting tips and tools you can try to fix the problem, whether you're on Mac or Windows.

#1 Keep your smartphone and laptop running with some basic battery life tips

Finally, what if you just want your phone or laptop to last all day? An oldie but a goody, our guide to saving your smartphone's battery covers all the basics, from switching off unneeded services and background notifications to using mobile sites. We've got Android- and iPhone-specific battery guides as well, but almost any phone model will benefit from a few basic tips, such as turning off Wi-Fi when you're not using it (Wi-Fi, however, uses less battery than cellular data if you're connected to a Wi-Fi network). These tips generally also apply to laptops.

Actually, the chemistry in lithium-ion batteries degrade over time. If the battery is being stored, there is a certain % of full that causes least degradation - around 40 - 80%.

When left plugged in, you are effectively storing the battery at 100%, which is worse than storing it at a lower percentage of full. There are programs that will reduce the maximum charge percentage if you use a device on AC a lot.

It's not a big difference, but worth doing to maximise battery longevity.

One of my work colleague told me that he was advised by a apple genius at a apple store that Macbook pro's can be plugged in charging all the time, because once the battery is fully charged, its automatically by passes continuously over charging the battery and runs on from direct wall socket electricity.
I tried searching for this information a lot online. could not find any definite answer about mac book or any other laptop.
Can any one verify if this is true?

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